schriverja

It would be an interesting thought experiment for a person like me, who was born after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, to try to assemble a history of MLK Jr using only verbal accounts. The time period from the present to MLK Jr life is roughly the same as the earliest gospel accounts. I wonder how well I (or anyone else) could do, how accurate we would tell MLK Jr's story?

I can hear the Christian argument coming, however, about how people of antiquity were a verbal culture, so their word-of-mouth passing of stories is somehow much more reliable than today, I just don't buy it...

avi

Thank you Roger.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, the oldest extant copy of Tertullian's work dates from the Eleventh century:

http://www.tertullian.org/works/adversus_marcionem.htm

Is this wrong?

I ask, because eight centuries of recopying, changing, modifying, inserting, and deleting, represents a lot of non-evidence to sort through.

regards,
avi

Atheos

Roger, surely you can appreciate how important it is to know who wrote a document if you're going to claim the document is eyewitness testimony. The claim of eyewitness testimony is the one being addressed in this thread.

Also, the demand is not that the document tell us about the author. The (very reasonable) demand is that the document simply tell us who the author is. None of the four canonical gospels manage to do even this trivial thing.

Newspaper articles generally aren't considered "eyewitness testimony". Yet news agencies recognize the importance of eyewitness testimony and use it in their reports. In doing so they usually clearly identify the witness. Admittedly sometimes they report something said by someone "speaking under conditions of anonymity", but they are at least responsible enough to disclose that to the audience. News agencies spend huge amounts of money transporting reporters all over the world to give them the appearance of being eyewitnesses of events being reported when possible.

Tolkein certainly is not eyewitness testimony. If your position is that the "Jesus" narratives are no more historically accurate than Lord of the Rings then perhaps you have a point, but I seriously doubt that was your intention.

It is the disingenuous assertion that the gospels are eyewitness testimony that demands that the question of authorship be satisfied with certainty.

People (Eusebius, Tertullian) making claims 100 or more years after the documents anonymously appeared does not constitute certainty. At best it is only wishful conjecture.

Supporters of this spurious claim are attempting to steal the credibility of eyewitness testimony without having to go to the effort of actually having eyewitnesses. At least news agencies have the integrity to spend the money and resources necessary to put reporters on the scene, and to admit it when they can't.

It's downright hypocritical. On the one hand this religion prides itself on honesty. Publishing these anonymous documents with those names firmly affixed in the title is misleading at best. Personally I find it deceitful.

gdeering

This is one of the weakest things I've ever read on this board by some one who supposedly knows something.


Does it strike anyone as odd that Mark, who is demoted to an "apostolic" man, was the source for Matthew - who was a genuine apostle? Why couldn't Matthew tell his own story? Though I guess there is a mile wide area of wiggle room if one redefines "apostle". As in "apostles of that name." Brother of the Lord, anyone?


Gregg

Red_Geranium

First, as others have pointed out, all but the most fundamentalist-leaning Biblical scholars dispute the claim that the gospels were eyewitness accounts. The gospels were originally written in Greek, not Aramaic, and - at least for Luke, maybe Matthew, and John the dates of their composition are not consistent with their being written by contemporaries of Jesus. The letters of the apostle Paul were all written before the Gospels. The Gospels are inconsistent on some points (not going to list those here). Also, even if one or more gospels actually was inspired by eyewitness accounts, we still know that eyewitness testimony is notoroiously unreliable.

When I was on my journey out of Christianity, I read a really great book all about the making of the Gospels and New Testament. It's called Who Wrote the New Testament?, and the author is Burton Mack.

Solo

Well, if it seems odd then it is because you are mixing up Heilsgeschichte with Formgeschichte. :huh:

Jiri

graymouser

Actually, if I opened Lord of the Rings I'd be surprised if I didn't find a short blurb on Tolkien's life. And if I read a newspaper article I'd be surprised if I didn't find a short line at the end about its author. These things are customary, so your example (which isn't terrifically relevant) fails.

In the ancient world, things weren't as author-phobic as you imply. For instance, Thucydides starts off telling us who the author was and why he wrote it, it doesn't start cold with the narrative of the Peloponnesian War. Diodorus Siculus tells us who wrote the work.

It's "curious" that you, who by all rights should know better, are presenting this information as if modern critical scholarship held that Tertullian (and Papias and Eusebius) were relevant to the actual authorship of the Gospels. No one today thinks they are.

For an actual valid analogy I'd look at the Wear Sunscreen speech. A little over a decade ago, an essay in the form of a mock graduation address by Mary Schmich was popularly circulated and widely credited to Kurt Vonnegut. It wasn't true, but the rumor spread pretty widely before getting debunked. This is one of thousands (if not millions) of cases of a text being attributed to a famous author who had nothing to do with it. Today, we have the resources to debunk these claims. But if a copyist - well-intentioned or otherwise - happened to write "Evangelion kata Matthaion" at the top of the gospel we know as Matthew's in the 2nd century CE, as the claim spread it would have been almost impossible to prove that it was just an incorrect attribution.

gdeering

Yeah, I do that all the time. My wife hates it when I do it, and the kids are starting to notice.

Minimalist

Thank you for the summary, Roger.


Not very impressive, is it?

aa5874

But, if you think about it the source that claimed Mark was "apostolic" is the source that claimed Matthew was a genuine apostle and wrote his own story.

The "apostolic" Mark got his story from the Apostle Peter.

However, it has been deduced by some that there were no writers named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and that they did not write at the time as put forward by the Church writers.

And it can easily be discerned that if the author of gMatthew was an apostle then the author of gJohn was not or vice versa since each one produced a different Jesus character.

The Jesus in gMatthew told the members of Sanhedrin that he would be coming back and that the very members of Sanhedrin would see him coming in the clouds.

The Jesus in gJohn did NOT tell the Sanehrin that they would see him again. Up to now the Jesus of gJohn appears to be right. Jesus is not coming back or can't come back unless he first come in the flesh.